BARZAKH - Correspondence Issue - Call for Submissions

Barzakh is a biannual multi-genre journal with an transnational stance, emerging out of the English Department at the University at Albany, SUNY. Our focus is on innovative poetics, narratives and translation. Past contributors include Lydia Davis, Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley, Jayne Cortez, Jonathan Skinner, Edwin Torres, Maria Damon and Marcella Durand.

the theme for issue 6 of

There is thus a one-to-one correspondence, and consequently equality of content between the two systems of partitions

Barzakh is CORRESPONDENCE in

To prevent the Indians from carrying on any clandestine correspondence with those whom his arms had not reached

all of its corresponding meanings

A correspondence fix'd wi' Heaven, Is sure a noble anchor!

in Arabic, Barzakh means

Exeter drives a very great Correspondence with Holland

the connecting link, the 'between' of

Of persons and things: Vital, practical, or active communication

something and

Fasting and abstaining from correspondence with their Wives

it asks

To answer the importunity of our lusts, not by a denyall but by a correspondence and satisfaction

do you write

If two points of a unicursal curve have an (a, a′) correspondence, the number of united points is = a + a′

please forward us

Such a correspondence between the inward sensations of one man and those of another

your corresponding

The tenet of Swedenborg, that every natural object symbolizes

poems

The special interest of this planet [sc. Mars] arising from its supposed close correspondence with the earth

prose

Our ill correspondence with the French Protestants

proems

The doctrine of Correspondences is the central idea of Swedenborg's system

translations

I had rather speake a truth in sincerity, then erre with a glorious correspondence

Barzakh is open to being surprised by your aesthetic approach. The keyword of this issue, Correspondence, can be regarded as our translation of what we believe Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick means by "reparative critical practices": rather than participating in the paranoia of reading driven by a "hermeneutics of suspicion," the injunction to expose the always-already-known, we desire to find in your creative work, and to practice on your work, a willful optimism about alternative ways of reading and corresponding. Here are just some of the questions that we hope to explore through your submissions.

• How might the visual, verbal, and/or syntactic ordering within your text enact correspondences that exceed familiar systems of knowing? What is the directionality of these correspondences?

• Identity rubrics such as race, nation, class and sexuality build communities and resist the dangers of myopic universalism but can also become competing categories that inhibit new crossings. We are particularly interested in works that perform a "translative project" betwixt and beyond recognized identities. How does your text illuminate new possibilities of social correspondence between the author and reader, between reader and reader?

• Digital technologies distribute text in a variety of new combinatory forms that can be questionably "concrete" or "material," yet also necessitate the use of multiple senses in ways that disrupt the symbolic order of the text. What new modes of interpreting meaning, what new possibilities of correspondence between author and reader, are demonstrated in your work by means of the digital technologies specific to our era?